Business Continuity Planning & Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are the kinds of things nobody really wants to work on. Planning for the unlikely seems like a waste of time, until the unlikely happens. What we’re looking at here is just the technology side of things, but there are larger business concerns as well, such as personnel, facilities and communications.

If you rely heavily on technology for work or play, it’s a good idea to spend some time thinking about—and planning—what you will do in the event of a disruption. At the bottom of this post I have provided links to some other resources that may be helpful in your planning.

BCP involves figuring out how to keep your operations running in the event of a disruptive incident: a fire, earthquake, hurricane—or even something relatively minor, like a computer hard drive failure, an extended loss of your network connection, or theft of critical equipment.

DR is a subset of BCP and deals with protecting the business in the event that all or part of its systems become unavailable for an extended period, or entirely unusable.

Control Measures as part of a BCP

• Preventive Measures (anti-virus, physical security, passwords)
• Detective Measures (system diagnostics programs, audit trails)
• Corrective Measures (data backups, redundant systems, spare equipment)

Here are a few checklist items that might help in thinking through various scenarios:

• Computer
  • keep a current bootable clone on hand (system restore)
  • spare computer to boot from
  • spare hard drive on hand
  • daily/hourly file backups (file restore)
  • consider using laptops for remote working
• File sharing access
  • server with a backup to restore from
  • online file service (redundant copy)
• Email Service
  • personal email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, ISP)
  • have more than one account, most are free
• Data network
  • redundant secondary internet connection (DSL, cable)
  • home network for remote option
  • wireless access cards for the computer (Sprint, Verizon)
• Voice network
  • cell phones

Some questions to consider when making your plans:

• If my computer crashes, how will I continue working?
• If my shared file access/server becomes unavailable, what will I do?
• If our office is inaccessible (flood, fire) where will my team work, and will they have the tools they need to conduct business?
• If my data network goes down, what’s my backup connectivity option?
• How will we communicate our alternative plans to customers and business partners?

BCP and DR Resources

Free Disaster Recovery Planning templates
(www.securityprocedure.com/14-free-disaster-recovery-plan-drp-template)

Disaster Recovery Guide (www.disaster-recovery-guide.com)

DR Planning (www.drplanning.org/portal)

Disaster Recovery World (www.disasterrecoveryworld.com)

DriveSavers Data Recovery

I have used DriveSavers Data Recovery once to recover data from a hard drive that appeared to be totally fried. They’re expensive, but very good at what they do. We spent around $2,000 for the work but every byte was recovered and returned.

I just noticed that they’ve published an iPhone app that educates users a bit about the causes of hard drive failures, and offers some data protection strategies you can use to prevent them. Pretty generous considering they make a living from people not doing these things. They also have a web-based (Flash) version of the app on their web site here. You can take a look into their ISO-5 Certified cleanroom environment where they do their work.

Direct link to the iTunes App Store page here (will launch iTunes).

They can recover data from a variety of sources:

• Laptop & desktop drives
• Digital cameras
• Tape
• MP3 players & iPods
• iPhones & iPads
• Removable media
• RAID / NAS / SAN environments

And if you think data recovery isn’t sometimes a very serious matter, they also have a suicide-prevention counsellor on staff. This underscores a very simple but often-neglected practice: data backups. If your data is even remotely important to you, have a backup strategy and stick to it.

Also check out their Museum of Bizarre Disk-asters.

Tonido Plug = Private Cloud

Cloud computing is getting a lot of play these days, and like everything else it has pros and cons. Perhaps the biggest downside is that you are trusting your data to a third party — their service could go offline for a while, or your data could be lost or otherwise compromised. Probably not likely with a reputable service since they have much to lose in that scenario as well, but it’s an obvious risk.

The Tonido Plug is a small $99 appliance that provides a way to set up a private server that you can share among others in your home or office, and also access over the internet (access is secured via password). The device plugs into your internet router via standard Ethernet cable, and also has a USB port for attaching an external hard drive (or even a small thumb drive). This is the NAS (Network Attached Storage) concept.

I like this approach for a home or small office that doesn’t want to invest in (or really need) a full-scale server machine for sharing files among a family or work team.

It comes with built-in software for:

• File-sharing
• Music streaming of your MP3s from your browser
• Blog / Journal
• Photo-sharing
• Search (your computer)
• Money Management

So the real upshot of this device seems to be that you can store your files and access them from any computer on the internet, as well as share files out selectively with others. Attach an external USB drive and you have your own private cloud on the internet.

Dropbox Reaches 2 Million Users

I mentioned Dropbox in a previous post — it’s an online file sync and storage system, and their growth this year has been impressive, adding about a million new users between May and September 2009.

They recently submitted their iPhone app for approval to the App Store, and I’m looking forward to seeing this. Mobile access to a Dropbox account should be a nice add-on to an already solid product.

Dropbox pricing:

• Basic (2GB) = free
• Pro 50 (50GB) = $9.99 per month
• Pro 100 (100GB) = $19.99 per month

Click here to get an account.

The Cloud Changes Everything

While doing some reading about small business startups I came across a presentation (below) on Slideshare called Cloud Computing Changes Everything. I’m interested in how this kind of utility computing service is making it possible for even small businesses to access powerful computing and delivery platforms at a relatively low cost. With a little research and development time, most anyone can build a business off of existing infrastructure.

The pay-as-you-go model allows you to use (and pay for) only what you need, with the option to scale up as your needs grow. Why build out and manage your own server and storage infrastructure when it’s already been done for you? Instead, leverage what’s there and focus on your business, doing the things you know and understand best, and outsource the bigger technical details to someone who is focused on doing that. They can do it cheaper than you can anyway.

Web hosting is a good example, on a smaller scale. I used to manage my own web server because I was hosting sites for my web development customers and wanted complete control of the technical environment. But it was a lot of work with relatively little added benefit to me or my customers — how much control did I really need over the machinery? Not that much as it turned out. I don’t want to be patching the OS and upgrading software and thinking about connectivity issues anyway. Web hosting providers have figured this out, and they do a good job of providing enough control while leaving their customers free from the day-to-day responsibilities of managing hardware. That’s one of the advantages of cloud computing.

Evernote

Evernote (www.evernote.com) is a product that probably falls into the Personal Information Management (PIM) category, but goes a little further in overall functionality. I’ve been using it since early July and I like it pretty well, although I’d like to see some minor improvements in upcoming releases.

The basic concept behind Evernote is to have a quick and easy way to capture bits of information that you want to keep for future reference, and be able to manage and access it from anywhere — on your own computer (Mac or Windows), on another computer with web access, or on your smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre or Windows Mobile device). Think of it as an all-purpose “digital bucket” for holding random things that you want to get to later.

You can capture notes, tasks, links, emails, web pages (entire pages or selected parts), photos, sounds, documents (PDF, text, html, Word, etc) — pretty much anything you want to grab and drop in there. It leverages the cloud to keep things in sync between your computer and handheld device. You can create tags in Evernote to categorize the things you put in there, which makes it easy to find them as the collection grows. Multiple tags can be associated with any item for cross-referencing, and the entire collection is searchable.

There’s an ad-supported free version that provides some good features and makes it worthwhile to try it out if you’re interested. The premium version is $45 for a year and offers much more — higher online storage amounts, SSL encryption for security, greater monthly upload allowance, and sharing and collaboration options.

In the short time I’ve been using it I have been pretty impressed with Evernote. Synching between my computer and my phone has worked quickly and seamlessly. If mobility is an important part of your work life, this is a good way to grab information from just about anywhere and have it with you wherever you go.

Google Apps

Everyone is familiar with Google’s search engine. Google also has a variety of other web-based applications and tools, many of which are free. See this page for a list of Google’s many different products and services. Below are a few of their products I have used.

Gmail

Gmail (www.gmail.com) is a webmail service, one of Google’s most successful projects that serves millions of users every day. Email accounts for the majority of internet traffic, and Google has created one of the best webmail services available. What I like best about it is the built-in spam filtering, which is excellent. I forward my personal email accounts through a Gmail account to take advantage of this feature, and I almost never find unwanted email in my Inbox.

Gmail can be used strictly as a webmail service, but you can also set it up to integrate with your computer’s email program or your handheld device (Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile). If you want to do this, set up your Gmail account for IMAP service so that your account will be synchronized correctly no matter how you access it. See this article for some of the benefits of using IMAP. Gmail accounts are free.

Maps

Google Maps (maps.google.com) provides satellite imagery, driving directions and much more for most of the United States and major cities in countries around the world. It’s a great resource for finding your way around. The Google Maps team has also taken on a very ambitious task with their Street View project — taking street-level photographs that are integrated into the regular mapping view. This is useful when you are mapping a destination and want to see what the place looks like before you get there.

Calendar

Google Calendar (www.google.com/calendar) is a great tool for tracking schedules, either personal or professional, and can be kept private or shared out with others you invite to view it. I’ve used it to collaborate with others on projects and set up the permissions so that everyone can enter notes, events and status as things progress. You can set reminders in the calendar to send you an email or text message, so you never miss a deadline. This would also be a good tool for students to use on school projects.

Docs

Google Docs (docs.google.com) is an online office productivity suite, providing word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software. You can create, upload, save, print, store and share files with others, or keep your files private. This is another good tool that provides a lot of benefit for those on a tight budget, or just looking for a quick way to create these files on a computer that may not have any kind of office suite installed on it. I cover Google Docs further in my post on office productivity software.

Book Search

Google Book Search (books.google.com) is a project to digitize and bring many of the world’s books online. Currently, you can search the full text of about seven million books. If you find something interesting, it will also show you where to buy or borrow a copy. They have partnered with many of the top libraries of the world to include their collections on Book Search, including the New York Public Library, Harvard University, Oxford, Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, University of Michigan, Lyon Municipal Library (France), Keio University (Japan), the National Library of Catalonia (Spain), and others around the world.

Backup Your Data

If you’ve never had a hard drive failure or accidentally deleted some important data (photos, video, documents, email, etc) then it’s probably just a matter of time until you do. Stuff happens. And when it does, having a good backup strategy in place can save the day.

I use a two-part process:

• Full system clone — this is a complete copy of the entire hard drive, in bootable form so that I can start up my machine from this copy if I had a severe failure on my laptop’s drive. (This backup is for system restoration — it only saves the most recent copy of files.)
• Incremental backup — this is an ongoing copy of files that I work with. When a file is edited or changed in any way, the next incremental backup will create a copy of that file, while also preserving the previous copy from the last backup. So if I change a file or delete it, and decide that I want to go back and get an earlier version of it, I can restore it from this backup. (This backup is for file restoration — it saves multiple versions of files but does not create a bootable version.)

The Setup

I have a 500 GB external firewire (IEEE 1394) drive. I created two separate partitions (volumes) of about 250 GB each. On the Mac you can do this easily with the Disk Utility program in the Applications > Utilities folder. One partition is for a full bootable clone backup (I name this partition Clone), the other is for an incremental backup (I call this partition TimeMachine, for reasons I’ll explain later). A firewire drive is not required if your computer doesn’t have a firewire port — USB 2.0 will do fine as well, but firewire is typically faster and uses the more intelligent peer-to-peer architecture for negotiating data transfers.

These two partitions exist physically on one hard drive, but the partition process makes it appear that there are two drives there. Drive partitions should be set up first, before any data is copied to the device. Once data has been copied to the drive, you cannot go back and partition it later without wiping all data from the drive. You don’t have to partition a single drive for your backups — you can use separate devices if you prefer and allocate all of the drive space to each backup process. I like the partition approach because I can just leave one device attached to my laptop all the time, and run backups without having to attach another one.

Clone Volume

The full bootable clone is created with the excellent, award-winning SuperDuper utility. This app is highly recommended. I configure SuperDuper to use the Clone volume for full backups. SuperDuper copies your entire drive over to the backup drive, configured to act as an independent startup volume. After the initial backup copy is created, you can set SuperDuper to just copy the changes next time, so it shouldn’t take very long to run subsequent backup jobs.

With a bootable clone you can startup from the clone in the event that your hard drive has a serious, unrecoverable failure. (This kind of error is rare but if it happens your data may be gone for good. Professional data recovery firms like Drive Savers might be able to recover your data, and it will likely cost you a minimum of $2,000. There’s no guarantee that they will be able to recover your data, but it is guaranteed that you will pay them for the attempt.) I run the clone backup every couple days so I always have recent restore point.

Time Machine Volume

Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) comes with a backup utility called Time Machine. This program runs incremental copies every so often throughout the day. When a file on your hard drive changes, the next backup of that file will capture the new, updated copy while also leaving the previous version in place. So if you accidentally changed or deleted a file, you can go “back in time” and restore a previous copy using the Time Machine program. The incremental backups are only limited by available disk space, so the more space you have on this volume the further back you can go.

I configure the Time Machine program to use the volume called TimeMachine as the backup drive. The first time it runs a backup will take a while, so plan on letting the initial copy finish the job. From that point on, brief backup jobs will run occasionally to update the changes you’ve made to files on your hard drive. If you discover that you need a file that you deleted two weeks ago, just enter Time Machine, navigate back to that point in time, and recover the last backup that was made of the file and restore it to your hard drive.

The last point about backups: test them regularly. Don’t just assume that your backed-up data is in good shape and ready to restore. There could be errors that will prevent restoration, and if this happens you want to know it before you need that data. I occasionally boot up from the Clone drive and launch a few applications, open some documents and photos, and just generally make sure that it is functioning exactly as I expect my main boot drive to function.

Also see the Dropbox post for an online option to file backup.

Cloud Computing

The concept behind cloud computing is to take advantage of multiple, distributed, powerful computing resources and deliver supercomputing power over the internet. This distributed technology environment is “the cloud.”

Cloud computing resources are usually accessed over the internet via a web browser, while the data and software are stored on servers in a data center — usually across several dispersed data centers for redundancy and guaranteed uptime. If a major data center has a power or connectivity failure, it has to be able to quickly route traffic over to a backup facility. Customers don’t like downtime.

Big internet companies like Google, Yahoo and Amazon have begun making their data center and server resources available to companies, universities and individual customers. For high-traffic web sites and intensive computation needs, these internet companies can share out part of their infrastructure for a much lower cost than what it would cost an organization to build and manage themselves.

Data centers are complex and costly to build and operate. They require lots of electrical power, cooling (servers get hot), security, technical staff, monitoring, redundant internet connections, and the ability to scale up quickly to meet increased demand while delivering data anywhere on the planet. As your company’s data needs grow, it’s quicker, easier and cheaper to leverage cloud resources than it is to build out your own servers and maintain a data facility.

For IT organizations, the biggest potential benefit of the cloud is in providing something that’s typically a cost and resource burden: the ability to increase IT capacity and capability quickly, without the need to invest in new infrastructure, personnel, training and software licensing.

(If you work in IT you might want to pay attention to the progress of the cloud model. It won’t happen right away, but as IT services move to more of an outsourced commodity, many infrastructure-based jobs will be eliminated, such as server monitoring and support and other hands-on technical work.)

Individuals and businesses are becoming increasingly data-dependent — our email, web sites, blogs, digital photos and videos, electronic documents — all of these things need a place to live (at least one place, preferably another copy somewhere else too, for redundancy). This is where cloud computing is going to play a bigger role in many areas of our work and personal lives.

Quick adaptation is the beauty of the cloud.